Op/Ed

Interrogations:
Gina Haspel (CIA) - Adolf Eichmann (SS)

Posted May 20, 2018 107:30 am | Op-Ed

By
Brian Terrell

By Brian Terrell

On May 9, Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s choice for head
of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified at her
Senate confirmation hearing in Washington, DC. Some
senators questioned her about her tenure, in 2002, as
CIA station chief in Thailand. There, the agency ran one
of the “black sites” where suspected al-Qaida extremists
were interrogated using procedures that included
waterboarding.

Ms. Haspel was also asked about her 2005 role in the
destruction of videotapes that documented the torture of
illegally detained suspects. Her evasive answers to
these questions, disconcerting and unsatisfying, are
hauntingly familiar.

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli
spies in Argentina and brought to trial in Jerusalem for
his part in the extermination of millions of European
Jews during Germany’s Third Reich. In his interrogation
with Israeli police, published as “Eichmann
Interrogated,” Eichmann stated that in the intervening
years since the acts in question his own view of them
had evolved.

Before the Senate on May 9, Haspel expressed herself
similarly.

Haspel testified that while she can’t say what
exactly might constitute an immoral order in the past,
her “moral compass” would not allow her to obey one
today, given the “stricter moral standard we have chosen
to hold ourselves to."

She does not judge the actions that she and her
colleagues took in the years after 9-11-2001, “in that
tumultuous time” of decidedly looser moral standards:
“I’m not going to sit here, with the benefit of
hindsight, and judge the very good people who made hard
decisions.”

She testified that she supports laws that prohibit
torture, but insists that such laws were not in place at
the time and that such “harsh interrogations” were
allowable under the legal guidance the CIA had at the
time and “that the highest legal authority in the United
States had approved it, and that the president of the
United States had approved it.”

Likewise, Eichmann was probed about his obedience
when “ordered to do something blatantly illegal.”

In a response that augured Haspel’s Senate testimony
a half century later, Eichmann told his interrogators:
“You say illegal. Today I have a very different view of
things... But then? I wouldn’t have considered any of
those actions illegal... If anyone had asked me
about it up until May 8, 1945, the end of the war, I’d
have said: 'This government was elected by a majority of
the German people... every civilized country on earth
had its diplomatic mission. Who is a little man like me
to trouble his head about it? I get orders from my
superior and I look neither right nor left. That’s not
my job. My job is to obey and comply.'”

Not to compare the evil of the European Holocaust
with the CIA rendition and torture (as if evil could be
measured by quantity), but the evasions and obfuscations
of these two willing technicians of state terror are
chillingly similar.

Eichmann’s cowardly protestations that he could not
have known that facilitating torture and murder was
illegal ring hollow. It was only after Eichmann’s
atrocities, though, that such crimes as torture were
formally codified into law.

However, by 2002, based on the precedents of the war
crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the United States was
legally bound along with most nations in the world to
the Geneva Conventions, to the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and the United Nations Convention against
Torture. Even the U.S. Army Field Manual, cited by
Haspel in her hearing, labels waterboarding as torture
and a war crime.

“We all believed in our work. We were all committed,”
Haspel proudly boasted to the Senate, describing the
morale and esprit de corps of her CIA comrades
overseeing illegal detention, torture and murder in the
years after 9-11.

Eichmann similarly praised the work ethic of his
team.

Inspired by Eichmann’s trial, Thomas Merton, in his
poem, “Chant
to be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces,”
put these words in the mouth of a condemned
concentration camp commander: “In my day we worked hard
we saw what we did our self-sacrifice was conscientious
and complete our work was faultless and detailed.”

An Israeli court did not buy Adolf Eichmann’s defense
that he was following orders and obeying the law as he
understood it. He was hung on June 1, 1962.

We will soon know if the U.S. Senate will accept Gina
Haspel’s appropriation of Eichmann’s alibi and confirm
her as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

[Shortly after this was written, Gina Haspel was
confirmed to be director of the CIA in a 54-45 vote.
– ed].

---------

Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator of
Voices for Creative Nonviolence and syndicated by Peace
Voice

Graphics and layout by the
Observer.

This piece was reprinted by the Columbia County Observer
with permission or license.